Perimeter
by TriscuitTheFlyingSnkCracker
Summary: On the Ancesterrian Perimeter Gaurd, things are odd. Odd in a way that usually means a quick, nasty and horrible death by some supernatural force. But what if you didn't know the truth about the Perimeter? I didn't.
1. Part I

**Author's Notes:** Hey all. I'm writing this fic as a departure from my other ones that I've been frustrated with lately. This one came to me after I had just finished _Sabriel_, and was moving on to _Lirieal. _I realized that I wanted to write a fic in this great world that Garth Nix had invented, but I didn't know what. I finally came upon this.It's set during the climax at the end of _Sabriel. _Sabriel and Touchstone have just landed from the paperwing and have been escorted into Sgt. Hoyle's office. However, this information is just to give the reader a cronological place to start from, and I must warn you that the narritive doesn't follow canon characters. Those looking for Sabriel and Touchstone smooches, or Mogget-saracasm (a personal favorite) would be wise to look elsewhere. Instead I focus on a character purely of my invention, which, for me, is a first.

Ah, and the rating. I'm shy about putting out an R-rated story, so I think I'll try to keep it PG-13. Keep in mind, however, that while I'm not a fan of gratuious swearing, there will be some situation-driven cursing in this. However, if I cleaned it up, I feel I would be cheating the reader. Also a warning about 'graphic' whatevers. They'll be in here too.

Well, with that said, enjoy. :)

* * *

_**Ah,**_ the life of a soldier. Guns, glory, good pay, and maybe one day a fancy bit of metal strapped to your chest. That's supposed to be it, right? Right?

Yeah. Not fucking buying it anymore.

I mean, you pull your stint, maybe get involved in all these exciting adventures, and then it's on home to impress the girls. Leastways, that's what the recruitment officer down southways told us. "Join the Army! Become a noble defender of the homeland!"

So far, my noble duty has consisted entirely of defending this large sack of potatoes. Spud duty, it's called. I'll explain.

Down at the border, potatoes are your three course meal, and after three courses you never want to see another bloody potato again. But for some reason, some bloke were pinching food supplies, and now every bin of food has a two man guard during the evening.

My partner on this sacred task was, like me, a new recruit from southern Ancesterre, although _his _recruitment officer had suckered him in with "Fifty quid a week!"

You also learned quickly that this was complete shite, too. We were making barely twenty quid, minus expenses, down by the Wall. This might have been another reason why the morale of my comrade-in-arms-and-also-bunkmate, Phillips, was skimming along rock bottom.

Right now, he was cursing.

"Stupid _bloody_ Wall, stupid _bloody_ shift, stupid _bloody_ sergeant..."

I let my gaze wander up to the setting sun, thinking that he must have to run out of things he could yell at _sometime_."

"Stupid_ bloody_ po-ta-toes..." he said, giving our bag a rough kick with each syllable.

I yawned. "Oh _shut_ up, Phillips."

He grinned at me in a sort of maniacal way. "Same thing for you, eh, Evans? Came for guns and glory, and all we get is shitting bag of spuds to look after?"

"Basically, yeah." I said, shrugging noncommitally, playing with my rifle. It felt cold and unfamiliar in my hands. Not for the first time I wondered what I was doing here.

"And the poeple up here," continued Phillips, looking at me sideways as he stooped to pick up a rock. "They're just so _wierd_, y'know?" He absently juggled the rock in his hands.

"Really? I didn't know. Only just arrived, myself." It was true. I had just come from college, and was greener than most of the boys down here. "How wierd?"

He shot me a look, and said sarcastically "What I mean, Evans, is that there are fellows up there, all dressed up like they're about to go to the King's ball. All dressed up in swords and armor, you'd think they'd just rode out of the fucking fourteenth century. You must have noticed." He threw his rock, with considerable skill and accuacy, right on top of one of the unmanned concret machine gun nests.

"Yeah, I saw some stuff." I said. "If they think that chainmail can stop bullets, let 'em think it."

"Here's another thing too." Phillips said, reaching around and digging into his army sachel, where you usually put your ammunition and extra rations. He removed his bayonet fixing and bayonet for his rifle.

His voice dropped consipiritorally "This guy I'd never seen before comes up to me, says 'Mate, let me se your bayonet.' I says okay and gives it to him, and before I know what, he's done something to it. Made a little mark, right 'ere." He pointed to a small circle, which was inscribed with a smaller circle, with a triangle and a cross overlaying them both.

I leaned over and frowned at it, careful to avoid the pointed end of the blade. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like that."

"Nor 'ave I." said Phillips. "The _wierd_ thing, Evans, is he didn't have anything to cut it with, it was just... _there_, where it wasn't but a 'alf second ago."

I was just about to tell Phillps a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for this, when all of a sudden, three sharp whistle blasts came from the trenches in front of us.

"Three whistles. What does that mean?" asked Phillips, tensing up. I dug into my fresh knowlege of command signals. I started "That means-"

All of a sudden the squawk of the intercom cut through the air.

"_All non-essential personnel are to leave the Perimeter Zone. Unauthorized entrance of civilians to the Perimeter Zone is strictly prohibited. Violators shall be detained or shot."_

The intercom gave one final squawk, and then fell silent. "What he just said." I finished lamely.

"Not very friendly, are they?" commented Phillips, wryly. He adopted a staunchy, proprietary school headmaster accent. "Whatever has become of Ancelstierran hospitality?"

He looked at me. "What do you think is going on?"

I shrugged. "It's a lockdown. Could mean anything. It may be a full scale invasion from the Old Kingdom, and it may be that there's some trigger happy commander on the intercom and somebody's been nicking the foodstuffs again."

Phillips pointed to the small, low slung building that housed the Perimeter HQ. "Somehow I don't think it's the last one, mate."

And he was right, I realized. _No _amount of ration-pinching could produce what was happening before us.

The trenches had gone from a usual weekday lethargy to a sudden beehive of activity. All around us, orders and counter-orders were being called out, equipment was moving, engines were spluttering and starting up, and ranks of infantry were pouring out of the barracks.

Me and Phillips turned to each other and both gave it the raised eyebrow.

Suddenly, I caught sight of Sergeant Hoyle. He's not a man you usually see around the base, too much bureaucratic nonsense that he has to deal with. I only recognized him from his picture that I had seen, when we were shown our commanding officers.

What's more, he was worried. Every few seconds, he cast a look over his shoulder, towards the great Wall. As if he was expecting something...

I was distracted from my dark train of thought when Phillips tapped my on the shoulder, and pointed at a figure by Sgt. Hoyle's side. "Who's that now?" he asked.

I peered in between the rushing men -- men who I realized were rushing to set up embankments and barbed wire, I realized – and saw a young girl, about seventeen, with long, elbow-length dark hair, hurriedly keeping pace with the Sergeant.

I stared at her. Not in _that_ way, of course, you understand. I mean, a man on the front lines does get a little...well, _odd_, sometimes, and I can't say she didn't have a rather attractive profile, but still...

Ah. _Ahem_. Where was I?

Oh yes. What caught my eye about the girl, aside from the fact that there _was_ a girl here at the Perimeter, was the curious bandoleer she had slung about her shoulder, with seven... what were they? Waterskins? Ammunition pouches?

She was walking up a set of concrete steps with Sgt. Hoyle when she looked around, as if someone was watching her. Well, I _was_ watching her, so she probably had a good reason to think that. She turned her gaze to me, and even from that distance I saw she had the darkest eyes of anybody I'd ever seen.

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and for one breath of a moment, there was a connection. She stopped, and I could see that despite the firmness of her posture, she was exhausted, and masked by her youthful figure, she had seen too many horrors to still be innocent.

She looked at me, and her eyes simply said-

I'm sorry.

Then whatever we had together snapped, and was gone. She took a breath, and continued alongside Sgt. Hoyle.

I was snapped out my revelry by a large lorry stopping in front of me between me and the girl. A man with MP's red hat and a small mustache hopped out of the drivers seat.

"You there!" he said, apparently addressing both me and Phillips. I gave him a sloppy salute, figuring that if he was yelling at me, he was a superior. Phillips just waved insuborantly and asked, "Mind telling us what's going on?"

"Captain's orders." said the man, giving the hairy eyeball to Phillips, who didn't notice or didn't care. Most likely both. "Everybody's supposed to be moved up, 'cept for a small detachment that's on special orders to relocate to Bain." He narrowed his eyes. "What are you doing?" he demanded at me.

I just looked at him. Then I said, as evenly as I could, I said "Protecting the Queen's potatoes, sir."

He gave me another extremely unfriendly look. _Ah, I see --_ I though – _he thinks I'm mad._

Well, evidently sanity was not a extremely valued asset in the Perimeter Guard, because he all he did was order us to move up to the front lines. I shrugged and went. Phillips followed, chuckling to himself.

"That was rather good." he said. "'Protecting the Queen's potatoes, sir'. Fancy that'll throw a wrench in Captain Asshat's evaluation of the troops."

"I try." I said, giving a mock bow.

The front lines of the Perimeter are arranged in a sort of concave V-shape, about fifteen yards across at the walls end, and with machine gun nests every three yards or so behind earthen embankments. Barbed wire is strewn across much of the open ground, it's pointed spikes threatening to entangle anyone stupid enough to lean over into it.

"Nice place to spend a holiday, eh?" I remarked. I wasn't expecting gales of laughter, but several men shot me dirty looks.

Mental note to self: Joking is illegal near the wall.

Meanwhile, Phillips was trying to coerce information from a man next to us in our Llewyn machine gun pit.

"So what's command worried about anyway?"

The machine gunner looked down at us with commanding grey eyes. "I don't know." he said simply. "Command isn't saying much, just to be on our toes." He tightened his jaw, and said in a low voice to us. "Command doesn't want the men to panic, that's all. You guys are new, right?" He leaned right down next to me.

"What if I were to tell you," he said softy "That there's an army of the dead on the other side of that wall there?"

I thought about this.

"I don't know." I said. "I'd probably ask you 'Is that a thing that you'd be likely to say?'"

Phillips broke in. "Wait, wait, wait. Hang on a bit here. You're asking me to believe that there's a bunch of dead people on that side of the wall?"

"An army, yes."

"Of the dead?"

"Yes."

"A dead army?"

"Not _dead_ dead, right?"

"_Yes._"

"Not just a little hung over?" Phillips asked, grinning like a maniac.

"You think I'm joking, don't you? You think this is some sort of game." he said, glaring disgustedly at Phillips, who stopped grinning.

He turned to me. "You look like you've got at least a bit of sense. You see that?" he said, pointing to a large sword bayonet poking out of the sandbag in front of the machine gun nest. "When this machine stops working, I want you to grab that and kill anything that comes in here."

I looked at the pommel of the sword bayonet, and looked back at the man.

"Do you really think something's going to happen?" I asked him, quietly.

The man shook his head.

"I wish I was lying."

Dusk came quickly. Too quickly for my liking. It was all good and well to laugh at the machinegunner's words in the light of day, but as the sun was half over the horizon, I began to grow uneasy. If somebody was dead, how did you kill them?

I was about ask this to my silent companion, when suddenly I heard a rumbling off in the distance. For a moment, I thought it was the man's 'Army of the Dead' and almost panicked, but then I realized there was a much more man-made explanation for the earth shaking like that.

Tanks.

I had never seen one in real life. But now I was amazed. Great green-grey metal beamoths, belching smoke, with many turrets sticking out of all sides, looking like a much more lethal pricker-burr. It's treads were easily as wide as Phillips' body, and I tried not to imagine what it would be like to be caught under those massive steel links.

All around me Perimeter Guardsmen were popping up like gophers out of holes to stare at the tanks. Then, somewhere, a cheer started up. It was echoed by another voice, and another, and another. I could see what they meant by their cheers. These were tanks, I mean... _tanks!_

Suddenly I felt better. Zombies and all were good, but nothing to a tank.

The grey-eyed machinegunner, however, did not cheer.

"They will not save them." he said, darkly and quietly, gripping the handle of his own sword.

And with that, the last rays of sunlight disappeared over the horizon.

For the next half-hour, the tension was unbearable, even worse than actually having something to deal with. My mind kept inventing imagined horrors as I looked out into the Old Kingdom. It was a place you were told stories about, in southern Ancesteirre. Not good stories, either. Stories of people who could bring souls back from the dead. Stories of half-men who walked the earth, feasting on human flesh. Stories of demons, half fire and half shadow, that would hunt down lonely travelers in the wild.

Yeah. Kid's stuff.

I shuddered.

The grey-eyed man looked at me. I could see that he saw that I was scared, which I'll admit I was. "Here," he said, and pressed his finger against my forehead. He spoke a few words that I couldn't understand, or maybe I wasn't listening properly, but all of a sudden a sudden calm filled me. Not courage, just a calm. For some reason, my eyes were drawn to his forehead, but it was covered by a protective helmet.

"Here," he said again, this time handing me a chain of ammunition. He stuck one end into his heavy Llywen machine gun and snapped the catch shut. "When I start to fire," he said "I want you to feed this end through, okay? It'll give you something to do, leastways."

I nodded dumbly. He doled out three phosphorus grenades from a box to me himself, me, and Phillips, who had grown uncharacteristically silent. He gave the rest to Phillips.

"I want you to throw those," he said to Phillips "On anything that gets stuck on that barbed wire. Understand?"

Phillips mumbled a "Yes, sir."

The machinegunner sighed "I apologize if I was a bit short with you either, but you've _got to know_. Things on the other side of that aren't going to be nice and exchange fire like in your neat little military drills down south. They're going to try to swarm into this nest and kill you in the worst way possible. No mercy, understand?"

Phillips looked up, and for the first time I had ever seen him, he had no jovial half-smirk on his lips. Instead, he looked pale and drawn, and I realized that I have must have been the same.

The man looked down at us, and gave a small chuckle. "Don't worry. As long as there's no wind blowing in from the Old Kingdom, we should be okay."

Phillips peered up out of the foxhole andlookedat somethingbehind the machinegunner.

"What about fog?" he asked softly.

_To Be Continued..._


	2. Part II

Immediately the machinegunner sprang up and looked over the embankment next to Phillips. I joined him and had to stifle a gasp of astonishment.

There was a fog, all right, impossibly dense moor or sea fog, coming though the gateway to the Old Kingdom. It was thick, amorphous, far denser than anything I'd ever seen before, and it came rolling up to our trench. It billowed and seethed, like a rippling blanket, and I knew in my gut that this fog was not moving on it's own accord. It was somehow, some way, being _guided_ by across the Wall.

Phillips rushed to put his gas mask on. I could see the wisdom in that. After all, it _might_ have been some new weapon. I had heard rumors of countries down southways that were developing gas for wars, but I couldn't imagine the _Old Kingdom_ getting their hands on that stuff..

And I was right. The machinegunner growled to Phillips. "Put that away." he said, gesturing to the gas mask. "It's harmless." he said, reaching over the lip of the embankment and brushing his hand through it. "But you should get yourself properly worried about what's _in _that fog, though. I've seen it once before when we crossed the Wall, and right after it settled we were ambushed." He notched up the machine gun a little further over the trench.

As the fog rolled on, enveloping first A Company's barracks, then C Company's, then finally the entire base, the electric lights around the base started to dim, the wink out, one by one, as if some unseen power was sucking both light and life from them. The tanks' ever-present engine rumble quieted, sputtered, and finally died. The tank crews shouted in alarm, but the boys in the trench stood there quietly. They had been _expecting_ this, I realized.

My rifle had long been in my hands, and now I was gripping it like a maniac, as if it was my last hold on safety. I was acutely aware of how _loud_ my breathing sounded, no longer covered by the electric hum of the lights.

A low _fiss_ came from behind me, and I started, pulling the hammer down on my rifle. But to my immense and ridiculously exaggerated relief, it was only a slow burning phosphorus flare, thrown into no-mans-land for illumination. A small circle of clear ground could be seen where it burned away the fog. Others joined it, and soon the Wall was lit by a flickering candlelight from the flares. It was probably just my overactive imagination, but I thought I saw _shapes_ moving across that Wall...

And at that moment, a slow low sound, like the echoing of a giant whistle came through the night.

"What's that?!" I yelled at the gunner, looking wildly around.

"It's the flutes." he said in amazement, looking up at the top of the Crossing Point on the wall, where several reeds had been tied on to the stone. Dark patterns that I couldn't quite make out were drawn on them.

"Make sense, damming!" I yelled, forgetting all civility and just generally being fed up with what was going on. "Flutes?!" I cried.

He pointed to the reads. "A man came up a while back. Put up those flutes. He said they were to keep the dead down.." He looked at me, and I could see astonishment in his eyes. "I've never heard them before."

The haunting pitch of the wind flutes on the Wall grew higher, higher, _higher_, until it was like one horribly long drawn-out _scream_.

I clapped my hands over my ears. Phillips and the gunner did the same.

The pitch past my hearing, but I could still _feel_ the flutes screaming, vibrating my jaw, rattling my teeth in their sockets. Then, in an instant, the reeds, Wind Flutes, whatever, _shattered_, sending shards of rowan wood down upon us like confetti.

The new moon slowly emerged from behind the clouds.

From behind the Wall, there now came the sound of a constant _stamp, stamp, stamp_ that sounded like a crowd of people, moving on our position. I readied my rifle up against the embankment. Whatever the _hell_ came from behind that Wall... I was going to blow it's fucking brains out. Simple. That, I reasoned, would slow just about _anything_ down.

"That's it lads." said the machinegunner, keen eyes watching the Point, waiting for the shadows and shapes behind the wall to move into range. "Keep it steady..."

Suddenly a howl erupted from behind the crossing point, and the stamping was replaced by a thunderous beat of thousands of feet.

"_Steady_...!"

And in they rushed.

Deformed, cankerous, loathsome, foul-smelling creatures, eyeballs missing or hanging from sockets, limbs missing or torn off. A far cry from the mock soldiers we had dispatched at basic training.

Putrescent odors boiled off them, so we could _smell_ them before we _saw_ them. When I did see them, they were directly in front of us. I looked at them, repulsed. Freshly dead, some almost still human, next to the rotted week-old corpses of the lately fallen. All running, running, running at us.

"**_FIRE!"_** bellowed the gunner.

The sound of fourteen forward mounted heavy machine guns all sprang to life in a single cacophony of gunshots, bullets and tracer fire. Countless more rifles opened up around us, individual shots lost in the fray.

The dead could take single rounds in them with no problem, it seemed, but 90 rounds per minute would cut them down like wheat before a scythe. The grey-eyed machinegunner was yelling something I couldn't hear, but a few seconds later, the tanks behind us opened fire.

Deep, bass _BOOMS!_ that shook my bones echoed around me from the four tanks placed at strategic points along the trenches. The Dead that were trapped in the barbed wire were obliterated by the shells, but still, more, more, _more_ came!

I took aim, sighted, and fired. I didn't know and didn't much care if I hit a head in that seething flow of dead flesh. Then I leaned over and started helping the gunner by feeding the yards long ammo clip from the box. I caught a glance at Phillips, yelling, almost frothing at the mouth, throwing one white powder grenade after another into the wire below. The combined acrid fumes of the fog, guns, Dead, and some sort of hot metal smell I can't describe, all bit at my nostrils, making me want to vomit. I choked back the bile and reloaded.

The gunner was screaming something at me. I stared at his once-calm grey eyes that were now livid with battle, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

"_What_?" I yelled as loud as I could.

"_They're flanking us!" _he yelled back. He unsheathed his long bayonet, and now I could see strange marks glowing and running up and down the length of the blade. "_Hold here! I'll cut them off! Man the gun!"_

And with that, he dashed off down the trenchworks to the east of the wall, where already the sheer force of numbers of the dead had broken through the lines. The men down there were fighting hand to hand. I didn't envy them.

Suddenly I felt very alone. I had come to understand that the grey-eyed man – I had never asked his name, I realized with a shock – as a sort of protector of me and Phillips. He seemed to know what he was doing, and I didn't. I felt very lost.

Something hard and heavy hit me on my right shoulder. I was Phillips' fist.

He was trying to get my attention. He looked at my shock, and bellowed at me in a voice I didn't know that old sardonic Phillips could make.

"_What the **hell** do you think you're doing, Evans?!" _he roared with an incredulous fury._ "Light up those bloody fucking things with the machine gun!" _

He scrambled over, nearly plowing me over with this tin plated hat, and started feeding a new strip of ammunition on to the old. I grabbed the heavy gun, feeling with my hands for the trigger. The Dead were all most on us now, climbing over their fellows who had fallen on the wire. One of them turned it's misshapen, diseased head toward us, and started to make for the pit. I fumbled. _Where was the trigger?!_

The dead thing had climbed the embankment. I was now looking directly into it's one remaining eye, blankly staring at me. It let out a howl of sick delight.

I suddenly remember the look that the dark haired girl and I had shared. It came to me, as I crouched here, knowing I was about to die.

_I'm sorry_.

My desperate finger found the trigger.

The gun leapt back and up with a mighty roar, blasting chunks of meat off the corpse. In the next second, my shoulder was slammed with the butt of the gun five times which felt like a hammer on my bones. I looked up-

And saw the creature _still_ coming for me! I saw that the hole in it's midsection hadn't stopped it, only slowed it down. The body of the Dead thing had fallen on the gun, a dinner-plate sized hole where it's stomach should have been, and the thing had fallen onto the muzzle of the gun with a soft, sickening _squelch_. It shrieked an inhuman squeal at the heat the metal was giving off, with the friction of every bullet adding a little more.

"_Phillips!"_ I yelled hysterically. _"Why won't this bastard **die**?!"_

Phillips, with a great presence of mind of which I will always remember him by, looked up from the ammunition pile and at the thing on the gun. He stared at it for what seemed like a _very_ long time, and at last reached into his satchel and whipped out his newly charmed bayonet like a knife, slicing the thing across the throat. It gave a horrible howl of pain and dark blood spilled everywhere, coating my hands with sticky, half-clotted gunk. It fell back, off of the muzzle, and straight into the hail of bullets coming from the machine gun, which blew it to pieces.

I think I lost it then. I started screaming and spraying bullets wildly left and right with the machine gun, but there were _still_ too many of the Dead. They were now on the sides of the embankment, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they climbed up into the foxhole and ripped me and Phillips from limb to limb.

I looked down at Phillips, still threading ammunition into the gun. "_PHILLIPS!" _I yelled. _"WE CAN'T HOLD OUT HERE MUCH LONGER!"_ I didn't know if he could hear me or not._ "WHEN. I. STOP. FIRING. MAKE. A. RUN. FOR. IT!"_

He looked up at me, and I saw him going over what I had said in his head. In a surprising display of calmness, he said. _"Sounds good!"_ Maybe the shell-shock had turned the man back into the Phillips I knew.

I counted to myself. Waited to till I had shot the dead off the embankment, and counted...

The tanks had stopped firing, I noted absently.

_One_...

The machine guns were also going silent for some reason.

_Two..._

One by one, the ear-defining sounds of man-made weapons were dying. As were the men. I could now hear them screaming. The howls of men and Dead, fighting hand to hand with each other.

_Two-and-a-half_...

My own gun died. The hammer kept clicking down, but the round wouldn't fire. I figured it was about time for-

_THREE!_

I jumped off the machine gun and immediately collapsed on the ground, jelly-legged. Philips grabbed me up and hoisted me over his shoulder to carry. My right shoulder felt like it had been jarred out of it's socket by the recoil of the machine gun, and my arm wouldn't heal for a couple of days, if I managed to get out of this to live those couple days. Had to admit the chances of _that_ were looking very bad. Extremely bad. Phillips-getting-a-date-with-a-member-of-the-opposite-sex bad.

But say what you will about his oddly-shaped nose and garlic-y breath, Phillips was a man and a half that day. He charged down the trenchline, myself limping along, with the strength of an ox. I sort of did a panicky tread in the air, even though I told my legs that they weren't really doing their job. A hundred yards away, he stopped for a breath. The fog had collected in the trenchline to form a deep, murky soup that I saw Phillips with effort exhaling from his lungs. He set me down on the side of the trench with my head above the denser fog.

Behind us I could still hear the men fighting for their lives up in the perimeter trenches. It was almost pitch-black now, and almost none of the flares that had illuminated the Wall were still shining through the thick haze. To the east of us, I saw a flash and the slow, steady, desperate _BOOM_ _BOOM BOOM_ of the last tank firing its shells. Then it stopped. What would happen to the men _inside_ the tank? I figured I didn't want to know.

I suddenly sat up with a start, and took a sharp breath, choking on the fog. I could hear the last men fighting out in the trenches.

"Phillips!" I breathed. "There are still men back there! We have to help them! We're, we're... _deserters,_ Phillips!" I grabbed at his shoulder madly, pointing back towards the network of trenches, vainly trying to pull him.

Phillips stood there as solid as a rock and looked at me if I had just turned into a walking, talking stoat.

"Have you gone completely_ mad_?" he shouted loudly and incredulously, his ears still not adjusted from the constant machine gun fire. "Deserters?" he asked, as if I were a large, walking, talking stoat in a bun with a side order of fries. "We barely fucking got out of there with our skins, mate! You want to _ruin_ that?"

"Yes, but the _men-_" I started weakly.

"The men back there." He said, matter-of-factly "Are either dying, dead, or both. The only way _we're_ not going to become Grade-A fucking zombie kibble is to keep our heads down, and get as far away from all this as possible."

He had a point. And I hated him for it. I hated the whole bloody situation.

"Right." I said, getting up, knees wobbling back and forth. "Right." I said again, trying to think of something to say next. "First things first. We've got to get out of here. From what I can tell, all the motors have died out for some reason. Unless we find a couple of bikes, we'll have to leg it."

From behind us came a marrow-freezing howl. I was sure that there was nothing worth dying for to save behind us.

"Well that's your _incentive_!" said Phillips, slightly sarcastic and visibly shaken. "C'mon!"


End file.
